These Magic Kids by Michael Hussein Tallon
âToday has been a day of awakening for me, and I suppose it has been for many of my age-contemporaries, too. As a fifty-one year old man, I donât cry much, but, wow, have I been a weepy mess all day today watching these magic kids. And thatâs the term that keeps coming back to me: These kids are magic.
They somehow donât seem real. They seem more like fully formed wizards who just popped into existence, as if the shooter who tore through their high school just showed up expecting sheep and found warrior-paladins instead.
But then it makes even less sense, because they arenât just from Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida. They are kids from everywhere. And they keep demanding that the media recognizes that they are from everywhere. These kids, these magic kids, keep saying to the interviewers, GO TALK TO THE OTHER KIDS. GO TALK TO THE BLACK KIDS. GO TALK TO THE POOR KIDS. GO TALK TO THE LATINO KIDS.
Then, as happened time and again today, when the cameras finally turn to the black kids and the Latino kids and the poor kids, THEY talk about other kids.
This isnât a story about Parkland, Florida and a really smart AP class with great prospects. Itâs about a full-on generation shift that caught me, and Iâm guessing you, totally by surprise. These magic kids are from EVERYWHERE.
Which begs the question: If they came from everywhere, then how did they happen?
The NRA and their sad, angry ilk have a readymade explanation: Theyâre actors. Theyâre following a script. Theyâre shills of Big Peace. Whatever. All that is insane, of course, but you can almost understand the confusion. The kids just donât seem normal. They arenât what we understand children to be, which of course is to say, âThey arenât like us. They arenât like we were when we were kids.â
And so we cast about for an easy answer.
But perhaps the answer isnât easy at all. Perhaps the answer is through a mirror darkly.
Millennials (who, believe it or not, are now in their thirties) and these Gen-Z kids have been painted with the most unflattering colors by my Gen-Xers and the Baby Boomers before us. Weâre the ones in positions of power in the world and what do we do? We call them all a bunch of crybabies. We give them endless grief for their constant insistence on things like âwhite privilegeâ and ânon-binary sexuality.â
We mock them for their safe spaces and their sensitivity to being triggered by language. We tell them they need to toughen up. We tell them that the world is a harsh place, as if we know better than them that brutal truth.
I think the reason we are so surprised by these kids is that weâve spent so many years telling ourselves that they were âsnowflakesâ who were going to get blown away by the real world, that we missed the coming storm.
The truth is these kids didnât spontaneously erupt from Florida a month ago. They have been deconstructing the bullshit of our generations for their entire lives, and now theyâre ready.
Not for nothing, these are the kids that were born, literally, in the months after September 11, 2001. They came into a world at war. They grew up in the shadow of ever-threatening âRed Alert Levelsâ and endless âActive Shooter Drillsâ and the ubiquity of âRektâ videos on 4Chan. They did not know one day of school before Columbine. They did not know one day of life without the threat of terrorism. They have not known one day of their nation in peace. Like it or not, they have lived every day of their lives, twenty-four-seven, on the battlefield.
We give them endless grief for playing video games. We tell them they should be outside, at school â but for so many of them, the schools and their streets are âsoft targets.â
God, Iâd stay in and play games where the bullets werenât real, too.
These kids grew up with the native ability to parse the OBVIOUS racism of Trayvon Martinâs murder, of Tamir Rice murder, of Philando Castileâs murder, of African American teenagers in McKinney, Texas getting the shit kicked out of them by police for being in a âwhiteâ neighborhood for a pool party. Just two days ago, they watched Stephon Clark get put down by over-amped, trigger-happy police while he was in his grandmotherâs backyard. They can see with their own two eyes that our society is grossly unjust â and so when the camera focuses on David Hogg, we shouldnât be surprised that this smart-dressed white boy says, TALK TO THE CHILDREN OF COLOR, as he did just yesterday in an interview with Axios. We shouldnât be surprised when he says âOur parents donât know how to use a fucking democracy, so we have to.â
Theyâve seen how badly weâve screwed up a free society for their entire lives and they are, in their own beautiful way, âcalling bullshit.â
The kids didnât magically arise in a fortnight; their whole lives have been calling bullshit.
They are digital natives with an ability to see the whole grand world. As such, they note that weâre the only economically advanced nation in the world where 30,000 people die from gun violence every year. They arenât cloistered in their own communities playing kickball, so they know that those deaths are skewed all to hell in the obviously racist, classist ways that are evidenced in the above mentioned state-sponsored crimes of racial bias. They know that Trayvon, Tamir, Philando and all the others arenât aberrations in the data set.
These kids might just be learning to shave, but Occamâs razor is intuitive. You need to train yourself into NOT believing obvious truths. Maybe Gen-Xers and Boomers have learned to bend themselves into a knot over that, but these kids? Not a chance. Of course they call bullshit on that.
When the âadultâ generations sit on our hands and say we canât just get rid of AR-15s because of the NRA and their power, of course they call bullshit on that.
When politicians who are blatantly sucking money from horrible people who manifestly make their world worse, of course they call bullshit on that.
We adults â and FINALLY with some level of self-consciousness in these matters, Iâm speaking as a middle-aged, white, privileged, man â have been so busy lampooning their beliefs, that we missed the point where they just went ahead and actually included everyone into their generational tribe â regardless of their race, gender-identity, sexuality, religion, or class. Weâre still arguing about gay wedding cakes and weâre still OBVIOUSLY treating kids of color worse than white kids. Of course they call bullshit on that.
What we missed, and why weâre so surprised that they have âmagicallyâ appeared, is that these kids threw our bullshit overboard years ago. They donât need our rigidity. They donât ever again need to hear someone say, âHey, everyone is a little bit racist.â They have no time for our âGod-hates-the-gays bigotry.â They have no place for our transphobia.
Grow up on a battlefield and you lose your illusions. Theyâre well over our befuddling myths of the way the world must be.
Moreover, they know theyâve got a fight ahead of them.
They are looking square into a future denuded of the possibilities we older folks took for granted. They can see, quite clearly, that like plagues of locust, our grown-up generations have stripped the nationâs resources, beshitted the global environment like we had a spare planet tucked in the garage under a tarp, presided over the destruction of our own middle class, and for a kicker, welcomed a parade of nationalist buffoons with fascist tendencies back into power.
These kids can see the tribalism and they know that soon theyâll be ascendant.
Their tribe is different than mine or yours. For now, theyâre young, but for all the rest of their time on this planet, they will be multiracial, non-binary, non-dogmatic, digitally native, omnivorously curious, and significantly bigger than either the surviving Boomers or the aging Gen-Xers.
These kids didnât spring suddenly from nowhere. Theyâve been watching us and learning from our nearly countless, self-imposed mistakes. Theyâve seen us run in pointless ruts, like cattle through an abattoir, and theyâve decided thatâs not for them, and so they called bullshit.
Theyâre calling bullshit and theyâre not making any safe space with their language for us if you consider this withering fusilade of truth from Mr. Hogg.
âIt is truly saddening to see how many of you have lost faith in America because we certainly havenât and we are never going to. You might as well stop now because we are going to outlive you.â
Yes, thank God, you will. But for as long as I can, Iâll follow you into the future. I just hope I can keep up. I have so much to learn.
*Found on Facebook (also found here: https://medium.com/@MichaelTallon/these-magic-kids-1aefbbeb81cd)
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